Channel Collaboration in E-commerce: A Study on Channel Relationship from the Perspective of Vendors Selling on Online Platforms, the E-retailers

Businesses today are getting agile with the infusion of new age information and communication technologies. In order to achieve business excellence, firms must possess strategic flexibility. They should focus not just on launching innovative products and services but also focus on how to deliver it or how to make it available to the market. In order to ride the uncertainty of the business environment and the risk associated with the same, firms must have strategic flexibility in marketing, finance, operations, information technology, and supply chain. Marketing flexibility can be realized by having channel collaboration in the value chain so that the value chain become more adaptive, responsive and sustainable. Marketers, therefore, today are exploring all possibilities of inter or intra-firm collaborations and coming up with business solutions with the sole objective of creating customer value. One such collaboration which has transcended all business boundaries and is transforming the landscape of the business in the twenty-first century is e-commerce. Fuelled by the meteoric growth in the advancement of communication and information technology, e-commerce has come about as an important marketing channel, which firms can no longer ignore. Indian e-commerce is pegged to reach the staggering US $35 bn by 2020. These online exchanges through the Internet are bringing together buyers and sellers in an interesting manner, which has not been witnessed earlier. Amazon Flipkart, Snapdeal, and many others in their marketplace model have collaborated with a huge set of vendors across the country for supplying goods and services to the end consumer. Amazon and Flipkart had more than 1,00,000 registered vendors in January 2017!! In this context, this chapter attempts to investigate the nature of collaboration between the vendors and the e-retailers and identify important elements of their trade relationship which contributes to general satisfaction in this electronic channel relationship.